Thomas Wentworth Wills is an Australian Icarus. Having grown up among the Djabwurrung people in western Victoria, he was sent to the Rugby school in England. Returning in 1856, he promptly revolutionised colonial cricket and opened the door for the evolution of the indigenous game we know as Australian football.
The Sentimental Bloke tells the story of Bill, a member of a larrikin push (or gang) in Melbourne's Little Lonsdale red-light district, who encounters Doreen, a young woman "of some social aspiration", in a local market. Narrated by Bill, the poems chronicle their courtship and marriage, detailing his transformation from a violence-prone gang ......
In this book, Ion Idriess reflects on his life prospecting in far North Queensland from 1912 to 1914, and coincided with his earliest writing as “Gouger” for the Bulletin.In Back of Cairns, Jack gives the reader a picture of what life was like when the peninsula jungle was falling under the settler’s axe, his own day-to-day experiences, and the ......
Leaves from the Diary of an Australian Trooper in Gallipoli, Sinai andPalestine during World War One
he Desert Column is based on the diaries that Idriess kept throughout the war. Published in 1932, it is one of Idriess' earliest works. Harry Chauvel noted in the foreword that it was the only book of the campaign that to his knowledge was "viewed entirely from the private soldier's point of view..." Idriess served as a sniper with the 5th ......
The book contains the final Chapter of Joan Lindsay's Picnic at Hanging Rock, removed before publication, despite it giving the reader knowledge of what happened to the schoolgirls lost at the St Valentine's Day picnic in 1900. First illustrated edition.
THE MURDER of my great-great-great-grandfather by Maori warriors caused his daughter, my great-great-grandmother, THOMASINE, to decide not to emigrate to New Zealand and instead to settle on the isolated Nerang River in South-East Queensland in what became the Gold Coast.
The story of survivors of the shipwreck of the Charles Eaton in the Torres Strait in 1834, through the eyes of young John Ireland who befriends the Mer Islanders; and their eventual rescue.
With authenticity that sometimes surprises the reader, Idriess introduces us to Aboriginals from Northern Australia, Papuan head- hunters, and Islanders around the Great Barrier Reef, all still in the colonial phase of European contact.
The first book to collate and explain the many fascinating elements of Aboriginal culture; the song cycles and stories, artefacts, landmarks, characters and customs, by the author of Wild Cat Falling and Master of the Ghost Dreaming.